Resilience Reimagined: A Practical Guide for Organisations

Discuss future failure

Consider connected impacts

Understand essential outcomes

Define impact thresholds

Balance strategic choices

Stress test thresholds

Enable adaptive leadership

We have all heard leaders who downplay threats: “It hasn’t happened yet”, “We are different”, “It is so unlikely”, “It can’t happen here”, “Too big to fail’. In some organisations, people lose psychological safety 6 . They fear that they will be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. Talking about potential problems can be perceived as ‘negative thinking’ in some organisations – but on the contrary, discussing future failure will help ensure a more positive outcome. There is a concept known as normalcy bias in psychology, which explains why people underestimate both the possibility of an incident and its possible effects. Experts attribute the problem to people’s tendency to interpret warnings optimistically. Any worrying indications that something terrible may happen are denied or trivialised. It results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. It also helps explain why individuals and organisations have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. The result is that many organisations sleepwalk into failure 1 . To overcome the mindset trap of normalcy bias and encourage people to discuss future failure, renowned scholars including Daniel Kahneman, Gary Klein, and Karl Weick promote the value of ‘prospective hindsight’. They recommend imagining future failure and looking back to generate better decisions, predictions, and plans.

FAILURES OF IMAGINATION Every leader in our research commented that we are entering a new period of uncertainty and change, with an ever-increasing possibility of failure. The threat landscape appears to be growing in complexity and volatility with the emergence of sudden shocks such as a pandemic, extreme weather events, terrorism, and long term intractable challenges, such as climate change, meeting the needs of an ageing society and tackling inequality. A growing reliance on inter-dependent technologies also exposes businesses to emergent threats and systemic/networked risks. Conventionally, risks are assessed from the likelihood of their occurrence versus their potential impact. Risks are classified on a risk register. A risk appetite is the amount of risk that an organisation is willing to take in pursuit of its strategic objectives and goals. The focus is on named risk types typically classified as minor, moderate, high, or severe. Organisations then define the effects and actions or interventions which would reduce the inherent exposure to the risks. Risks are assessed periodically, often annually. Government can play a role in enhancing access for organisations of all types to evidence about the multitude of hazard-related risks, including the use of futures thinking, foresight techniques, and real-time notification and early warning systems.

COVID-19 SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN A SURPRISE Pandemic influenza has been identified as the highest consequence threat on the National Risk Register 2 since the first edition was published in 2008. In a 2015 TED talk, Bill Gates 3 warned that we are woefully underprepared for the ‘next outbreak’. He appealed to national governments and businesses to work together to build a global warning and response system for epidemics. We were not adequately prepared. Why? Inspiration for our title ‘Resilience Reimagined’ comes from a striking statement on page 344 of the 9/11 Commission Report 4 : “Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies… It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing the exercise of imagination. Doing so requires more than finding an expert who can imagine that aircraft could be used as weapons”. Karl Weick 5 argues that complex and severe events are often a failure of imagination, “the world is rendered more stable and certain, but that rendering overlooks unnamed experience that could be symptomatic of larger trouble.” We need to reimagine resilience as we enter a new period of uncertainty and change, with an ever-increasing possibility of crises.

9 Resilience Reimagined: A practical guide for organisations